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Books > Language & Literature > Biography & autobiography > Literary
A formally audacious and deeply moving memoir in three timeframes
that confronts the defining trauma of the twentieth century, and
its effects on a father and son. In 1939, Jonathan Lichtenstein's
father Hans escaped Nazi-occupied Berlin as a child refugee on the
Kindertransport. Almost every member of his family died after
Kristallnacht, and, arriving in England to make his way in the
world alone, Hans turned his back on his German Jewish culture.
Growing up in post-war rural Wales where the conflict was never
spoken of, Jonathan and his siblings were at a loss to understand
their father's relentless drive and sometimes eccentric behaviour.
As Hans enters old age, he and Jonathan set out to retrace his
journey back to Berlin. Published to coincide with the eightieth
anniversary, this is a highly compelling account of a father and
son's attempt to emerge from the shadows of history. For readers
who enjoyed East West Street, The Berlin Shadow is a beautiful
memoir about time, trauma and family. Praise for Jonathan
Lichtenstein's work: 'The writing is keenly observed and
emotionally resonant. . . an impressive achievement given the
breadth of its reach, from Berlin in the 1930s to Bethlehem today'
New York Times on Memory
What could be a more tempting Christmas gift than a compendium of
David Sedaris's best stories, selected by the author himself? From
a spectacular career spanning almost three decades, these stories
have become modern classics and are now for the first time
collected in one volume. For more than twenty-five years, David
Sedaris has been carving out a unique literary space, virtually
creating his own genre. A Sedaris story may seem confessional, but
is also highly attuned to the world outside. It opens our eyes to
what is at absurd and moving about our daily existence. And it is
almost impossible to read without laughing. Now, for the first time
collected in one volume, the author brings us his funniest and most
memorable work. In these stories, Sedaris shops for rare taxidermy,
hitchhikes with a lady quadriplegic, and spits a lozenge into a
fellow traveler's lap. He drowns a mouse in a bucket, struggles to
say 'give it to me' in five languages and hand-feeds a carnivorous
bird. But if all you expect to find in Sedaris's work is the deft
and sharply observed comedy for which he became renowned, you may
be surprised to discover that his words bring more warmth than
mockery, more fellow-feeling than derision. Nowhere is this clearer
than in his writing about his loved ones. In these pages, Sedaris
explores falling in love and staying together, recognizing his own
aging not in the mirror but in the faces of his siblings, losing
one parent and coming to terms - at long last - with the other.
Taken together, the stories in The Best of Me reveal the wonder and
delight Sedaris takes in the surprises life brings him. No
experience, he sees, is quite as he expected - it's often harder,
more fraught and certainly weirder - but sometimes it is also much
richer and more wonderful. Full of joy, generosity, and the
incisive humor that has led David Sedaris to be called 'the
funniest man alive' (Time Out New York), The Best of Me spans a
career spent watching and learning and laughing - quite often at
himself - and invites readers deep into the world of one of the
most brilliant and original writers of our time.
Bram Stoker, despite having a name nearly as famous as Count
Dracula, has remained an enigma. David J. Skal, in a psychological
and cultural portrait, exhumes the inner world and strange genius
of the writer who conjured an undying cultural icon. Stoker was
inexplicably paralysed as a boy and his story unfolds against a
backdrop of Victorian medical mysteries and horrors: fever, opium
abuse, bloodletting, quack cures and the obsession with "bad blood"
that inform every page of Dracula. Stoker's ambiguous sexuality is
explored through his acquaintance with Oscar Wilde, who emerges as
Stoker's repressed shadow self-a doppelganger worthy of a Gothic
novel. The psychosexual dimensions of Stoker's correspondence with
Walt Whitman, his punishing work ethic and his adoration of the
actor Henry Irving are examined in scholarly detail.
This celebration of the woman who took us to the heights of a
secluded attic and the depths of our own dark psyches reveals an
intimate portrait of the famously private V.C. Andrews-featuring
family photos, personal letters, a partial manuscript for an
unpublished novel, and more. Best known for her internationally,
multi-million-copy bestselling novel Flowers in the Attic, Cleo
Virginia Andrews lived a fascinating life. Born to modest means,
she came of age in the American South during the Great Depression
and faced a series of increasingly challenging health issues. Yet,
once she rose to international literary fame, she prided herself on
her intense privacy. Now, The Woman Beyond the Attic aims to
connect her personal life with the public novels for which she was
famous. Based on Virginia's own letters, and interviews with her
dearest family members, her long-term ghostwriter Andrew Neiderman
tells Virginia's full story for the first time. The Woman Beyond
the Attic is perfect for V.C. Andrews fans who pick up every new
novel or for fans hoping to return to the favorite novelist of
their adolescence. Eye-opening and intimate, The Woman Beyond the
Attic is for anyone hoping to learn more about the enigmatic woman
behind one of the most important novels of the 20th century.
Academic - Scholarly - Defoe Studies - Political History -
Eighteenth-Century History; In this new book, Furbank and Owens
attempt to disentangle the story of Daniel Defoe's political
career, as journalist, polemicist, political theorist and secret
agent. They argue that this remarkable career calls for a good deal
of rethinking, not least because biography and bibliography are
here inextricably intertwined. The book challenges the current
account of Defoe's political career - rather drastically in some
cases. It argues, for example, that Defoe's cherished story of his
intimacy with King William - a staple of all previous Defoe
biographies - was most probably an (immensely bold) fiction, a view
which, if correct, entails considerable revision of his personality
and career. Likewise, it offers a new interpretation of the famous
series of letters Defoe wrote in 1718 to his Government paymaster,
the Whig Undersecretary of State Charles de la Faye,
A SUNDAY TIMES LITERARY NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR A GUARDIAN
BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR (AS CHOSEN BY AUTHORS) **LONGLISTED FOR THE
BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE** **SHORTLISTED FOR THE RSL ONDAATJE PRIZE**
'Outstanding. I'll be recommending this all year.' SARAH BAKEWELL
'A beautiful and deeply moving book.' SALLY ROONEY 'I like this
London life . . . the street-sauntering and square-haunting.'
Virginia Woolf, diary, 1925 Mecklenburgh Square, on the radical
fringes of interwar Bloomsbury, was home to activists,
experimenters and revolutionaries; among them were the modernist
poet H. D., detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, classicist Jane
Harrison, economic historian Eileen Power, and writer and publisher
Virginia Woolf. They each alighted there seeking a space where they
could live, love and, above all, work independently. Francesca
Wade's spellbinding group biography explores how these trailblazing
women pushed the boundaries of literature, scholarship, and social
norms, forging careers that would have been impossible without
these rooms of their own. 'Elegant, erudite and absorbing, Square
Haunting is a startlingly original debut, and Francesca Wade is a
writer to watch.' FRANCES WILSON 'A fascinating voyage through the
lives of five remarkable women - moving and immersive.' EDMUND
GORDON
Published in 1999. Lord Byron and Madam de Stael made a great
impression on Europe in the throes of the Napoleonic Wars, through
their personalities, the versions of themselves which they
projected through their works, and their literary engagement with
contemporary life. However, the strong links between them have
never before been explored in detail. This pioneering study looks
at their personal relations, from their verbal sparring in Regency
society, through the friendship which developed in Switzerland
after Byron left England in 1816, to Byron's tributes to Mme de
Stael after her death. It concentrates on their literary links,
both direct responses to each other's works, and the copious
evidence of shared concerns. The study deals with their treatment
of gender, their grappling with the possibilities for heroic
endeavour, their engagement with the social and political
situations of Britain, France and Italy, and their conceptions of
the role of the writer. Although Byron will need no introduction,
Mme de Stael's standing as a French romantic writer of the first
rank is made plain by the strong impact of her writings on the
English Poet.
A woman of enormous talent and remarkable drive, Zora Neale Hurston
published seven books, many short stories, and several articles and
plays over a career that spanned more than thirty years. Today,
nearly every black woman writer of significance -- including Maya
Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker -- acknowledges Hurston as
a literary foremother, and her 1937 masterpiece "Their Eyes Were
Watching God" has become a crucial part of the modern literary
canon.
"Wrapped in Rainbows, " the first biography of Zora Neale Hurston
in more than twenty-five years, illuminates the adventures,
complexities, and sorrows of an extraordinary life. Acclaimed
journalist Valerie Boyd delves into Hurston's history -- her youth
in the country's first incorporated all-black town, her friendships
with luminaries such as Langston Hughes, her sexuality and
short-lived marriages, and her mysterious relationship with vodou.
With the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression, and World War II
as historical backdrops, "Wrapped in Rainbows" not only positions
Hurston's work in her time but also offers riveting implications
for our own.
'A huge, fizzing omnium-gatherum of a book . . . marvellous' Daily
Telegraph 'Witty, wise and elegant . . . a classic of history
itself' The Spectator 'Grave and witty, suave yet pointed . . .
full of energy' Hilary Mantel 'An enthralling investigation . . .
consistently entertaining' The Times 'Epic . . . whatever Cohen
writes about he writes about with brio' New Yorker Who writes the
past? And how do the biases of storytellers - whether Julius
Caesar, William Shakespeare or Simon Schama - influence our ideas
about history today? Epic, authoritative and entertaining, Making
History delves into the lives of those who have charted human
history - professional historians, witnesses, novelists,
journalists and propagandists - to discover the agendas that
informed their world views, and which in so many ways have informed
ours. From the origins of history-writing through to television and
the digital age, Making History abounds in captivating figures
brought to vivid life, from Thucydides and Tacitus to Voltaire and
Gibbon, from Winston Churchill to Mary Beard. Rich in character,
complex truths and surprising anecdotes, the result is a unique
exploration of both the aims and craft of history-making that will
lead us to think anew about our past and ourselves.
Series Information: Routledge Critical Thinkers
Charlotte Brontes years in Belgium (184243) had a huge influence
both on her life and her work. It was in Brussels that she not only
honed her writing skills but fell in love and lived through the
experiences that inspired two of her four novels: her first, The
Professor, and her last and in many ways most interesting,
Villette. Her feelings about Belgium are known from her novels and
letters her love for her tutor Heger, her uncomplimentary remarks
about Belgians, the powerful effect on her imagination of living
abroad. But what about Belgian views of Charlotte Bronte? What has
her legacy been in Brussels? How have Belgian commentators
responded to her portrayal of their capital city and their society?
Through Belgian Eyes explores a wide range of responses from across
the Channel, from the hostile to the enthusiastic. In the process,
it examines what The Professor and Villette tell Belgian readers
about their capital in the 1840s and provides a wealth of detail on
the Brussels background to the two novels. Unlike Paris and London,
Brussels has inspired few outstanding works of literature. That
makes Villette, considered by many to be Charlotte Brontes
masterpiece, of particular interest as a portrait of the Belgian
capital a decade after the country gained independence in 1830, and
just before modernisation and expansion transformed the city out of
all recognition from the villette (small town) that Charlotte knew.
Her view of Brussels is contrasted with those of other foreign
visitors and of the Belgians themselves. The story of Charlotte
Brontes Brussels legacy provides a unique perspective on her
personality and writing.
"The great virtue of McCormick's memoirs is their blunt honesty. He
writes with a persuasive directness about what happened to him and
what he believes..."--Arts and Letters The title of John
McCormick's autobiographical book, may be taken both literally and
symbolically. In a literal sense, going to sea was an early and
powerful ambition, while seagoing is also a metaphor for the twists
and turns in a rootless life, a long voyaging. This is not a
conventional autobiography. It is personal only as necessary for
continuity, and never confessional. The essays center upon telling
episodes in the author's life and strive for objectivity and
accuracy about the recent past, both personal and historical. He
does so, as he writes, without "any pretension of producing a true
history." The events of his life are necessarily unique to him,
thus he finds uniqueness in the events that impinged upon him.
McCormick begins with his early years, growing up in the American
mid-West during the Depression, a time of broken family relations
and random jobs. He relates his falling away from religious faith.
He describes his first experience as a sailor in a tanker, which
gave him physical liberation, a world free of constrictions, as
with Hemingway. In discussing his early teaching experience, he
gives a vivid portrayal of Germany in the immediate postwar years,
along with observations of residual pro-Hitler sentiment and the
awkward circumstances (for Germans) of the immediate past. He
devotes a chapter to a moving memoir of his friend Francis
Fergusson, eminent Rutgers University scholar. McCormick also
relates his experience as an amateur bullfighter and reiterates his
defense of bullfighting as an art. He paints a vivid picture of an
adventure at sea while working on a definitive biography of George
Santayana, reflecting also on changes in the genre of biography,
with its prevailing emphasis on trivia and sensationalism. In
describing his retirement to England, McCormick describes the
conflict between nationalism and expatriation. He punctuates
details of his naval war experiences with thoughtful observations
on military combat. Finally, in his closing chapter, "Coda: Closet
Space," McCormick attempts to make sense of old age and death. This
autobiographical account of a well-lived life encompasses far more
than a splendid teaching and literary career. It will provide
insight and good reading for those who know McCormick's scholarly
work, for students of the humanities, and for the general public
interested in vivid prose. John McCormick is professor emeritus of
comparative literature at Rutgers University, and honorary fellow
of English and literature at the University of York. He is the
author of George Santayana: A Biography, Catastrophe and
Imagination, The Middle Distance, and Fiction as Knowledge.
First published in 1957, this book explores what remained of
Joyce's background, not only in Ireland but in those cities abroad
where his books were written. With the co-operation of those who
knew the author, including his brother, much new material was
brought together to shed new light on Joyce's life, character and
methods of writing. The author traces Joyce, and his writings, from
his beginnings in Ireland, through Zurich, London and Paris, to his
difficult final year at Vichy in 1940. Previously unpublished
letters illustrate his relationships with important figures of the
period like Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and H.G. Wells. This title will
be of interest to student of literature.
Hailed on its original publication as "eloquent testimony to the
engaging power of art in a man's life" (Washington Post), this
deeply moving memoir, long out of print, is reissued with an
illuminating new afterword. When acclaimed poet Gregory Orr was
twelve years old, he shot and killed his brother in a hunting
accident. From the immediate aftermath-a period of shock, sadness,
and isolation-it quickly became clear that support and guidance
would not be coming from his distant mother. Nor would it come from
his father, a philandering country doctor addicted to amphetamines.
Left to his own devices, the boy suffered. Guilt weighed on him
throughout a childhood split between the rural Hudson Valley and
jungles of Haiti. As a young man, his feelings and a growing sense
of idealism prompted him to activism in the civil rights movement,
where he marched and was imprisoned, and then scarred again by a
terrifying abduction. Eventually, Orr's experiences led him to
understand that art, particularly poetry, could work as a powerful
source of healing and meaning to combat the trauma he carried.
Throughout The Blessing, Orr articulates his journey in language as
lyrical as it is authentic, gifting us all with a singular tale of
survival, and of the transformation of suffering into art.
From Leonardo Da Vinci to Oliver Sacks: the first history of the
western polymath, from the Renaissance to the present "An absorbing
group portrait and intellectual history."-Kirkus Reviews "An
admirable mixture of industry and erudition."-Robert Wilson, Wall
Street Journal From Leonardo Da Vinci to John Dee and Comenius,
from George Eliot to Oliver Sacks and Susan Sontag, polymaths have
moved the frontiers of knowledge in countless ways. But history can
be unkind to scholars with such encyclopedic interests. All too
often these individuals are remembered for just one part of their
valuable achievements. In this engaging, erudite account, renowned
cultural historian Peter Burke argues for a more rounded view.
Identifying 500 western polymaths, Burke explores their
wide-ranging successes and shows how their rise matched a rapid
growth of knowledge in the age of the invention of printing, the
discovery of the New World and the Scientific Revolution. It is
only more recently that the further acceleration of knowledge has
led to increased specialization and to an environment that is less
supportive of wide-ranging scholars and scientists. Spanning the
Renaissance to the present day, Burke changes our understanding of
this remarkable intellectual species.
Uncovers the life of Jane Cumming, who scandalized her
contemporaries with tales of sexual deviancy but also defied
cultural norms, standing up to male authority figures and showing
resilience. In 1810 Edinburgh, the orphaned Scottish-Indian
schoolgirl Jane Cumming alleged that her two schoolmistresses were
sexually intimate. The allegation spawned a defamation suit that
pitted Jane's grandmother, a member of the Scottish landed gentry,
against two young professional women who were romantic friends.
During the trial, the boundary between passion and friendship among
women was debated and Jane was viewed "orientally," as morally
corrupt and hypersexual. Located at the intersection of race, sex,
and class, the case has long been a lightning rod for scholars of
cultural studies, women's and gender history, and, given Lillian
Hellman's appropriation of Jane's story in her 1934 play The
Children's Hour, theater history as well. Frances B. Singh's
wide-ranging biography, however, takes a new, psychological
approach, putting the notorious case in the context of a life that
was marked by loss, separation, abandonment--and resilience.
Grounded in archival and genealogical sources never before
consulted, Singh's narrative reconstructs Cumming's life from its
inauspicious beginnings in a Calcutta orphanage through her
schooling in Elgin and Edinburgh, an abusive marriage, her
adherence to the Free Church at the time of the Scottish
Disruption, and her posthumous life in Hellman's Broadway play.
Singh provides a detailed analysis not only of the case itself, but
of how both Jane's and her teachers' lives were affected in the
aftermath.
January 1957: girl meets boy on a blind date arranged by Allen
Ginsberg. The girl was Joyce Johnson, the boy Jack Kerouac, and it
was nine months before 'On The Road' became a permanent part of the
American vocabulary. But like Robin Hood's and Peter Pan's, Jack's
was a boy gang. Women were minor characters at best, though they
risked much more to live as freely as the rebels they loved.
Tender, observant and beautifully written, Joyce Johnson's
award-winning 'Minor Characters' is both a personal memoir and an
unforgettable portrait of that whole, near-mythical, generation:
the Beats.
This collection is a celebration of Paula Gunn Allen's life
(1939-2008) as an indigenous scholar, writer, and woman. It
features the creative writing, art, and memoir of Native American
and other writers, scholars, and activists including Patricia Clark
Smith, Maurice Kenny, Barbara Mann, Janice Gould, LeAnne Howe,
Elaine Jacobs, Annette van Dyke, Margara Averbach, Kristina Bitsue,
Deborah Miranda, Carolyn Dunn, Jennifer Browdy, Joseph Bruchac III,
Sandra Cox, and La Vonne Brown Ruoff. It follows the 2010 West End
Press edition of Paula Gunn Allen's final works, America the
Beautiful: Last Poems, edited by Patricia Clark Smith.
No writer alive today exerts the magical appeal of Gabriel Garcia
Marquez. Now, in the long-awaited first volume of his
autobiography, he tells the story of his life from his birth in
1927 to the moment in the 1950s when he proposed to his wife. The
result is as spectacular as his finest fiction.
Here is Garcia Marquez's shimmering evocation of his childhood home
of Aracataca, the basis of the fictional Macondo. Here are the
members of his ebulliently eccentric family. Here are the forces
that turned him into a writer. Warm, revealing, abounding in images
so vivid that we seem to be remembering them ourselves, Living to
Tell the Tale" "is a work of enchantment.
This ambitious book presents the first sustained analysis of the
evolving representation of Cuthbert, the premier saint of northern
England. The study spans both major and neglected texts across
eight centuries, from his earliest depictions in anonymous and
Bedan vitae, through twelfth-century ecclesiastical histories and
miracle collections produced at Durham, to his late medieval
appearances in Latin meditations, legendaries, and vernacular
verse. Whitehead reveals the coherence of these texts as one
tradition, exploring the way that ideologies and literary
strategies persist across generations. An innovative addition to
the literature of insular spirituality and hagiography, The
Afterlife of St Cuthbert emphasises the related categories of place
and asceticism. It charts Cuthbert's conceptual alignment with a
range of institutional, masculine, northern, and national spaces,
and examines the distinctive characteristics and changing value of
his ascetic lifestyle and environment - frequently constituted as a
nature sanctuary - interrogating its relation to his other
jurisdictions.
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